How to Use Social Media for Launching Your Book

Congratulations! You have given birth to the book you have wanted to write for some time. And like any birth, there was joy and pain along the way. Now that the writing process is finished, you need to get your book out into the world and give it the opportunity to thrive.

About thriving, how would you get people to read your book if it doesn’t make it to a large audience? To reach a large audience, you need to market your book the right way. Even if your imagination is better than J.K. Rowling's, and your non-fiction book is on par with Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, you must spend equal time if not more marketing your book. Because if you don’t, you won’t get any traction.

So, marketing part is as important as the writing part. Now the only question in your mind would be “How can I pull this off? I’m a writer, not a marketing expert.”

Let us help you answer this question. You can be a known writer and hit top sales charts by focusing on marketing your book with the help of social media.

What Can You Get from Using Social Media?

Exposure

The most important thing for you, as an author, is to find your audience. Fortunately, through social media, you have access to almost all the people in the world. On Facebook alone, there are more than 1.8 billion monthly active users. Imagine the potential!

And every type of business owner knows that potential. That’s the reason there are already 50 million active business pages on Facebook alone. Twitter is used by 93% of all the organizations in the world. Social media gives brands, businesses, entrepreneurs, authors, and companies worthy exposure.

Benefits of Echoes

Suppose you have made an official Facebook page for your new book. You used Facebook advertising to reach new people. Let’s assume a person named Jill was going through her news feed and saw your post. It piqued her attention. She opened it, and read it. It was so good that Jill liked and commented on it. Cheers, you got a fan!

But it doesn’t end here. We’re talking about echoes. So, when Jill liked your post, all the people who are friends with her or following her will also see she liked your post. If Jill has 100 friends and followers, your post may get to roughly 70-80 of them as “Jill liked this”.

If your post was awesome, more of them will read it and like/comment on it, and it will be echoed to their own circle. And that’s how a post goes viral. The best thing about this process is that getting likes is easy as pressing a button. A button that has been pressed more than 1.1 trillion times.

Let’s also talk about manual recommendations. Recent numbers show that 71% of people who like a brand on social media recommend it to others. It means if your social media accounts are informational and interesting, then 7 out of 10 people will tell others about it. That includes both online and offline word of mouth. And that works because people listen to their loved ones. A recent study showed that 81% of people get influenced by their friends and family's recommendations online.

Authority

Authority is something that can’t be faked and people know it. That’s why every entrepreneur works to get it. As an author, your ticket to authority is social media.

As almost everybody is on online nowadays, if you market yourself right, people will start noticing you. When you start getting a good flow of people, you will see more and more people following you. And that is authority…when thousands of people start engaging with you because they think of you as a credible author.

When more people are visiting your page this leads to more people become interested in reading your book and purchasing it. With more popularity, you’ll be getting calls for interviews and requests to be a paid speaker. (If that's one of your goals as an author)

Social Media Advertising

Let’s face it. Social media is a pay to play field, and rightfully so. Why rightfully? Let us explain.

Low Cost

In a recent research where social media was toe to toe with traditional marketing, it came out as the lowest form of advertisement. It gave a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) of $2.5, whereas other means were costly—newspapers and magazines cost $16, and Radio cost $10 to reach the same number of impressions.

That was traditional marketing. Even in the realm of online marketing, social media is turning out to be the best form of advertising for small businesses, startups, and authors. Because of a high ROI (Return on Investment) even on small spending. And that is the reason there are more than 4 million advertisers on Facebook alone. The numbers are astonishing as last year social media platforms collectively generated ad revenue of $31 billion.

Targeted Advertising

Social media knows people’s habits. Tingshao Zhu, a cyber-psychology professor, and his colleagues found in their study that social media gives clues about the personality of the person using it. And if other people can tell so much about a person by seeing the profile and comments, think how much the social media platforms themselves know about the behavior of their users. Now, this might be a privacy issue for some, but as an advertiser, this is gold for you.

How?

As social media websites have extensive knowledge of their users, they give you tools to target the exact audience you want to see your ads. On Facebook, you can filter people way more than just location, age, and gender. There are more filtering options like languages, interests, behaviors, connections, and more.

When you get your targeted audience to see your posts and your content is interesting to them and they will click, like, comment, or share it. It will give you two huge benefits:

1. People will start knowing about you and your book, which is what you are looking for.

2. This will boost your post engagement, which will help you get even lesser advertising costs.

How to Best Use Social Media Marketing?

Start Early

For a successful social media campaign, you need to create buzz around your book launch. That can only be done if you start 2-5 months before the actual publishing date depending on the level of promotion you want to do. This gives you time to establish yourself on social platforms, build an audience and create hype for your book.

Choose Social Platforms

According to the AOL Platform study, the best social platforms for sales are YouTube and Facebook. The report also showed that other networks like Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn are great ways to build brand awareness.

Make Your Social Profiles and Pages Carefully

What you communicate about yourself through your social profile matters a lot. You should only share the info which will help you create the image you want to establish. Take these tips while creating your social profiles and pages

Your Name

Start with your name. You want people to easily search you, so if your name is common like James Hicks, you should include your middle name for making it unique like James K. Hicks.

Your Profile Picture and Cover

You may think that you are on a social platform and you should share an informal profile picture, don’t. Choose a professional picture of yourself.

Then comes the profile or page cover. The best strategy of using page cover is to show the most important thing you want people to know about your book launch, your affiliation with a big name (more on this later in the influencer marketing section), or any award you won.

Profile Bio (About Section)

Here you have to write about yourself in a few lines. You should keep it client facing. Tell them why you’re the expert in the field and how your book can benefit them.

Take Care of Mobile Users

According to an estimate, there are 2.7 billion active social media users globally, and 2.5 billion of them use social platforms through mobile devices. That means about 92% social media users access it through mobile. So, for your book launch campaign to work, you need to mold your strategy to be impactful for mobile users.

Another benefit of targeting mobile users is that your posts are 2x more likely to be shared compared to desktop. That is the reason why everybody else is focusing more on mobile advertising. In 2016, Facebook showed in its financial report that 84% of all the advertising is targeted to mobile users. Twitter has, even more, mobile-friendly story to tell as 89% of total ad spending on it is done for mobile ads. These numbers are only growing over time.

Create Brand Awareness

The first rule of creating brand awareness is to not talk too much about the brand. Huh? That doesn’t sound right. But it is.

That’s because you want people to engage. If you are just talking about yourself people will get irritated and mute your conversations or unfollow you.

The first thing you should do is to come up with a content-driven strategy where you will share valuable information. A good rule of thumb is 80% content and 20% sales—or more simply, creating brand awareness is about engaging people to your posts/tweets. Let us give you some tips and ideas on it.

Be Specific

Your content must be specific to your audience. This doesn't seem like a big thing, but it is important. Many social media campaigns fail solely due to this reason. That is why Liz Strauss, a renowned branding strategist and social media marketing expert, advices newcomers like you to narrow down your niche to widen your opportunities.

Use Images and Infographics

Text posts work, yet images and videos excel at reaching more people. On Facebook, posts with images have 2.3x more engagement than text posts. So, be sure to post images—and for sharing info, use infographics as people love to know about new stuff in a visual way. This will boost engagement levels that build relationships with your potential readers.

Make Use of Videos

Videos are easy to consume. YouTube reports that its video consumption is increasing 100% every year. Even marketers love videos as 82% of them think that videos are an important part of their marketing strategy. To create brand awareness, videos are a must!

Look into Newsjacking

Basically, newsjacking is about using a trending news story at your advantage. You do this by referring to it in your post in a creative way. It is a great way to increase your visibility—because when you do it, your post gets visible to millions of people searching for or following that story.

For example; you remember the iPhone 6 ‘bendgate’ fiasco? KitKat used it in a beautifully humorous way. They tweeted “We don’t bend, we break” with the hashtag of bendgate. Now, because of the addition of the trending tag “bendgate”, that tweet reached millions of people.

Posting Variety of Content is The Key

No matter how much engaging your last post was, don’t share another post of the same type in the next few days. For example; if you asked a question related to your book, then give question posts a rest, and share other types of posts mentioned above. Show some variety. This will help you avoid being monotonous, which will get you more engaged readers.

Keep an Eye on Analytics

Use analytics to know which kind of content is getting more attention and which is not. You can, then use this knowledge to enhance your upcoming posts.

Use The Power of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is about getting people with a huge following (influencers) on social media to promote your book. Think about it. If a credible writer or any other influencer with millions of followers tweets about your new book, most of his/her followers will check it out. Your book sales will see a jump, which hopefully will rank it in the bestselling category.

Moreover, influencer marketing is popular among marketers as 80% of them think of it as an effective tool for marketing. And 94% of those who employ influencer marketing, says that it is giving them great benefits. So, it is worth a shot!

Use Automated Tools

To apply social media correctly, it takes a lot of time. However, you can use some automated tools to save some of your valuable energy. You can look into Hootsuite or Buffer for managing multiple social accounts from a single place. Google around and see which tools resonate with you. Or you can hire us and free up time to write your next book!

Conclusive Thoughts

Social media can prove to be a powerhouse of marketing for your new book—which will, in turn, help you build authority in your niche. The best tip we can give you is to value your audience because it is your greatest asset.

Let us know if you have any questions on social media management, we are here to help!